The essay interrogates a range of critically neglected nineteenth-century anthologies, periodicals and yellowbacks to reveal the ways in which ephemeral Gothic narratives contributed revealingly and troublingly to the public understanding of medicine across the nineteenth century and not just during the fin de siècle. By addressing how narratives of everyday medical encounters and interventions were immersed in contemporary anxieties about the nature of medicine and the role of the practitioner, the authors draw attention to how the figure of the practitioner is increasingly problematized until he himself becomes a locus of pathological disturbance, creating a set of images associated with medicine, practitioners and the everyday that proved culturally enduring across nineteenth-century culture.

James Baldwin might be imagined as reaching his greatest level of popularity within this current decade. With the growth of social media activist movements like Black Lives Matter, which captures and catalyzes off a Baldwinian rage, and the publishing of works directly evoking Baldwin, his voice appears more pronounced between the years of 2013 and 2015. Scholars in Baldwin studies, along with strangers who were turned into witnesses of his literary oeuvre, have contributed to this renewed interest in Baldwin, or at least have been able to sharpen the significance of the phenomenon. Publications and performances highlight Baldwin’s work and how it prefigured developments in critical race and queer theories, while also demonstrating Baldwin’s critique as both prophetic and “disturbingly” contemporary. Emerging largely from Baldwin’s timelessness in social and political discourse, and from the need to conjure a figure to demystify the absurd American landscape, these interventions in Baldwin studies follow distinct trends. This essay examines the 2013–15 trends from four vantages: an examination of a return, with revision, to popular work by Baldwin; identifying Baldwin’s work as a contributor to theoretical and critical methodology; Baldwin and intertextuality or intervocality; and a new frontier in Baldwin studies.

community actors, classic figures of humanitarian work or development ( Olivier de Sardan, 2005 ): chiefs, women,
elders and youths seen as legitimate actors, able to both represent and influence
the ‘community’ – that is, to be intermediaries of community
engagement between the intervention and local populations. This article shows how
both the legitimacy of these actors embodying the response and eventually the
intervention itself was contested and negotiated through localised encounters. 1

about unintended consequences. Equally, there is a long history of how humanitarian
endeavours have played a role in sustaining or exacerbating conflicts, where
humanitarians intervened with the best moral and ethical intentions and principles but
in the end were arguably pivotal in prolonging suffering, a pertinent example being the
then ‘innovative’ humanitarian interventions in the secessionist war in
Biafra that ended 50 years ago and has been a milestone in re-thinking humanitarian
action

worldview
– where the suffering of strangers is a matter of concern, and a legitimate ground for
principled intervention, for everyone – that humanitarianism and human rights enjoy full
legitimacy. They are both morally grounded by the same ends, ends that have thrived under US-led
liberal order for four decades (reaching their zenith from 1991 to 2011). During this time, both humanitarianism and human rights have provided a seemingly non-political
(or perhaps ‘political’ not ‘Political’) outlet for religious and
secular activists, many from the left

management and child nutrition to illustrate how tracking devices have been used for
control and governance purposes. Section 4 offers an inventory of proposed aid uses
of wearables – the central issue here is not present or future uses but what
is imagined as possible, appropriate or useful interventions and
– crucially – for whom? Section 5 reflects on how wearables challenge
our basic understanding of aid as a gift, of who provides resources and of who
benefits, as

Introduction Despite seventy years of UN programme interventions, the need for global humanitarian
assistance has not been greater since the end of the Second World War ( UNHCR, 2016a ). In 2017, more than 201
million people living in 134 countries required humanitarian assistance, with a
record 68.5 million people forcibly displaced by violence and conflict ( Development Initiatives, 2018 ; UNHCR, 2017 ). The use of violence and
conflict by state and non-state actors towards innocent civilians is

the
decision to focus on a single case study (of humanitarian intervention in Somalia
since the 1990s) and to focus our activities on a workshop format. This approach, we
felt, would concentrate our discussions and make tangible the lessons learnt more
effectively than attempting to find answers to such far-reaching questions in a
global context. Somalia was selected because of its pivotal role in redefining
humanitarian aid in the post-Cold War era. The crisis in the

Planned Obsolescence of Medical Humanitarian Missions: An Interview with
Tony Redmond, Professor and Practitioner of International Emergency Medicine and
Co-founder of HCRI and UK-Med

.
It seems to me a cultural, a psychosocial block. If you talk about surgery , for example, in a humanitarian setting,
immediately among many NGO workers their antibodies will rise. They will say,
‘That’s terrible, you can’t allow that Western, too high-tech
surgery; it is inappropriate.’ But then if you say, ‘So, what about
obstructed labour and interventions to save the mother and the child?’, then
they say, ‘Oh, that’s fine,’ but that is
surgery . It is a